The Interactive Whiteboards, Pedagogy and Pupil Performance ...

• Speed: making processes happen more quickly than other methods
• Automaticity: making previously tedious or effortful processes happen
automatically
• Capacity: the storage and retrieval of large amounts of material
• Range: access to materials from a wider range of sources than otherwise
possible
• Provisionality: the facility to easily change something which has been
produced
• Interactivity: the automatic provision of feedback in response to an action by
the user
• Clarity: the display is easy for pupils to see or interpret;
• Authenticity: the tools and resources are the same or similar to those used by
professionals in the field;
• Focusability: the drawing of pupils’ attention to particular aspects of a display
or idea
• Accuracy: items are constructed with greater precision than is realistic
manually
• Multimodality: the facility to switch between visual, aural, and textual display
• Availability: the scope of resources which can be accessed in practice
• Selectability: the facility to make a choice of resources or actions easily
implemented
• Collatability: the facility to bring together a variety of items from different
sources into a single resource
• Shareability: the facility to communicate and interchange resources and ideas
easily with others
• Templating: the provision of a standard outline structure for individuals to add
their own ideas
(Kennewell, 2004)
The study found that there was much greater commonality in the pattern of use of
IWBs in the primary classrooms observed than in the secondary classrooms. In the
latter, subject teachers’ selected different aspects of the technology, which
“reflect(ed) the differences in subject culture and pedagogical practices associated
with each curriculum area” (Ibid 2004). Thus the Maths teacher highlighted the
provisionality of the technology, the MFL teacher its focusability and the Science
teacher its automaticity and clarity. Kennewell concludes that “teachers decide what
affordances they will make available and what constraints they will impose in order to
facilitate and structure pupil activity and maintain an appropriate learning gap. It is
the process of orchestrating the affordances and constraints of the features to match
pupils’ needs in relation to the intended learning which is the key to developments in
pedagogy which lead to improvements in learning” (ibid). The study as reported so
far does not identify what enables or constrains teachers from using the technology
to best pedagogic effect.
Exploiting the potential of ICT: Are IWB’s simply another case in point?
The research undertaken so far is mixed. Whilst there is a clear consensus on what
the advantages of IWBs might be in the abstract, observation of the technology in
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